Budding Dancers Compete, Seriouslyby ERIKA KINETZ for the New York Times

While Whitney Schmanski, wearing the shortest of shorts and a green bustier-style top, took the stage in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria on Tuesday night, her older sister, Tori, was having a tracheotomy done in Salt Lake City. On Father's Day, June 19, the car the girls were riding in flipped over into a pond. Whitney, 10, emerged unscathed, but Tori, 14, was knocked unconscious and remained underwater for about 15 minutes. She has been slipping in and out of a coma ever since.

Every summer, the graduate- year students of the London Studio Centre go on tour with their Images of Dance programme, and the director, Margaret Barbieri, is a dab hand at compiling a rewardingly varied repertory. The latest, in which the young dancers somehow kept their cool in London’s sweltering Peacock Theatre last Sunday, opened ambitiously with Petipa’s Kingdom of the Shades (necessarily reduced in numbers), which was carefully staged, and the corps of Bayad ères excelled themselves.

Walking along the Brooklyn Heights promenade, the pint-size aspiring dancer stops and points at the Manhattan skyline, which looms like a passing starship. "It all happens there," the little girl says.Skip to next paragraphKeith Bedford for The New York Times

Charles Martin, left, Luke Davis and Carol Uraneck at the Central Park Zoo early this month. They are among 400 chosen from across the nation for the Joffrey workshop.

What happens in Manhattan is dance. And dance is the world to the girl in this scene from "Mad Hot Ballroom," a documentary film about elementary-school children in New York who rumba, fox trot and tango their way to glory.

Seven dance students visiting from the Southwest watched the movie at a theater in Manhattan last month. As the movie ended, they giggled into the lobby - pirouetting, jumping and crouching into a tango. "I could so live here," said Charles Martin, 16.

Hannah-Mairi, from Ayr, who began dancing at the age of three, will study at the Sylvia Young school in London, for the next three years. She received £51,000 from the fund set up in memory of Donald Dewar, the late first minister and supporter of the arts.

A stepping stone to successby VALERIE LAWSON for the Sydney Morning Herald

The scholarship is the richest ballet prize in Australia and marks a turning point for 16- and 17-year-olds, many of whom are on the brink of joining a full-time ballet school linked with a major ballet company, here or abroad.

Knowing a mission, staying on pointHarlem dance school relies on ballet luminaries to pass their lessons on to othersby CLAUDIA La ROCCO for the Chicago TribuneAssociated Press

The master class is part of a new initiative by DTH co-founder and artistic director Arthur Mitchell, who has invited a host of dance luminaries to teach during the annual six-week summer program, as part of his effort to provide opportunities for dancers of all backgrounds. Other guest artists are past New York City Ballet principals Jacques D'Amboise and Allegra Kent, former DTH principals Virginia Johnson and Lorraine Graves and former Martha Graham principal Mary Hinkson.

5, 6, 7, 8From city to city, young dance teams are doing the competition shuffleby CHRIS McNAMARA, special to the ChicagoTribune

The members of Robert's Rebels Clogging Team, 12- to 17-year-old girls from Dayton, Ohio, are dressed as the ninjas. They flitter backstage, jittery feet amplified by tap shoes, until they are announced. Then they storm the stage to the opening notes of the disco hit "Kung Fu Fighting."

New York has lots of great dance studios: Steps, Broadway Dance Center, New Dance Group. The problem with great dance studios, I find, is that they are full of great dancers. Even the beginners' classes are loaded with Equity cards and triple pirouettes.

Artistic director Helga Ishikata has tried to put the poignant tale of "The Little Match Girl" behind her, but each time she tries a new production, she misses it, and vows to stage it again.

So, for roughly the 15th year, the Delta Children's Ballet Theatre of Antioch will present the enchanting ballet based on the short Hans Christian Andersen story. After many months of rehearsals, the nonprofit children's troupe will perform at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.

"Every time I do it I say this is the last time, and then I miss it and bring it back," she said. "The children, they like doing it. They also have to act, they get to be characters; they really like it rather than just doing dancing."

Holland Dance Festival ran from October 27-November 13 in The Hague and encompassed a huge range of dance with 60 companies from all over the world performing and giving workshops in nine different venues across the city.

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